Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday August 28, 2014 @08:25AM
from the may-the-bridge-collapse-upon-you-and-your-family dept.

An anonymous reader writes Earlier this year, Google sued Beneficial Innovations for breach of contract, ostensibly in defense of its Doubleclick ad technology clients against whom Beneficial Innovations had filed suits despite Google having already paid licensing fees for the technology. Following Google's jury trial win, the company was originally awarded only 'nominal damages of $1 and a judicial order stopping Beneficial from going after more Doubleclick customers.' Now, however, the presiding judge has ruled that Google is entitled to some attorneys' fees in the amount of $1.3 million (PDF).

This was a breach of contract suit over a settlement between Google and Beneficial, under which Beneficial wasn't supposed to bring infringement suits against Google customers. They did, hence the breach. The settlement included a provision under which a prevailing party could get attorney's fees after a breach, and this was just the judge awarding those fees.

That's not to say that there aren't people winning money from patent trolls - there are, in other cases, and the lower standard for awarding fees to the defendant is a result of the Supreme Court's decision in Octane Fitness last April. But this isn't one of those - this is more like Google suing the guy who paints the fences at the Googleplex for doing a shitty job, and then getting attorney's fees under their existing contract.

The article also doesn't explain why someone would sue even though they were being paid. Did Beneficial Innovations (OMG, even the name is trolling) not realize these customers were covered?

If I'm reading the follow through articles right, Google and Beneficial reached an agreement about Google using the patents. This included terms about Google's customers using Google products based on those patents. Beneficial tried to argue that some organisations were using the patent-involving products outside the terms of the agreement with Google, and so were violating the patents themselves. They tried to sue those organisations, so Google stepped in to slap them down.